Why BBC owes a bigger apology to women like JK Rowling than to Donald Trump

I was listening one Saturday morning in September 1967 when Tony Blackburn played the first record on Radio 1 – Flowers in the Rain by The Move if I remember correctly – and Top of the Pops defined my adolescence. There had to be silence while my father watched the teatime news and Saturday afternoons were, of course, dedicated to Grandstand.

Living as we did, in a farm cottage in an isolated corner of southwest Scotland, the BBC was our window to the world. We trusted the institution implicitly, as did the rest of the country. Its word was its bond with the public who willingly paid the annual licence fee for the most trusted broadcast news and best entertainment in the world.

READ MORE: BBC boss Tim Davie and head of news Deborah Turness resign over Donald Trump documentary editing

Editing Trump, pro-Palestinian bias

Fast forward 50-plus years and the BBC is in crisis, after breaking the sacred promise set out in its charter to “provide impartial news and information to help people understand and engage with the world around them”.

An investigation by Michael Prescott, a former BBC editorial standards adviser, has revealed that journalists edited a speech by President Donald Trump to make it look as if he was directly encouraging the 2020 Capitol Hill riots. It also showed “systemic problems" in the BBC's Arabic-language output, including biased reporting on the Israel-Gaza conflict that favoured pro-Palestinian narratives and under-represented Israeli viewpoints.

And Prescott’s dossier suggests that, over the last decade, the BBC has effectively censored women’s voices in their coverage of the gender debate. He alleges that the broadcaster’s LGBTQ desk was allowed to veto news coverage that did not align with its belief that a person’s sex is simply a matter of choice.

‘Real women’

This revelation is hardly news to women’s rights campaigners who have tried for years to highlight the BBC’s biased coverage, where high-profile employment tribunals such as the Darlington nurses were largely ignored and very little time was given to gender-critical women. Feminists writers including Joan Smith and Julie Bindel, who were once regulars on the BBC, were suddenly persona non grata.

In 2017 one of the UK’s most senior female journalists, Dame Jenni Murray – then the main host of Radio 4’s Women’s Hour – was issued with an official warning and banned from discussing trans issues on air after complaints about her assertion that men who undergo sex-change operations cannot be “real women”. She left the programme in 2020 after 33 years.

According to the BBC’s former diplomatic editor, Mark Urban, one Newsnight producer even urged his colleagues not to submit an interview bid for one of the world’s most famous women, author JK Rowling, as she was “very problematic”. Ms Rowling is a vocal – and very effective – women’s rights campaigner. The BBC has, however, shown an unusually high number of stories about drag queens over the last ten years.

Head of news admits gender mistakes

Heads have already rolled at the BBC. Its director general, Tim Davie, and the head of news, Deborah Turness, have resigned. The corporation has apologised to President Trump but has rejected his demand for $1 billion in compensation for defamation.

In a staff call on Wednesday, the BBC”s head of news content, Richard Burgess admitted that it had made mistakes in its coverage of the gender debate. It is reported that he told journalists they must now cover the gender debate impartially and consider the views of both sides.

Some veteran journalists tried to defend the indefensible. In a social media post that he later deleted, the author and foreign affairs correspondent John Simpson said criticism of the BBC’s failings was a “hysterical pile-on”, while the former political editor of the Guardian, Michael White, described the manipulation of Trump’s speech as a “clumsy” edit.

He also employed the infamous reverse blame tactic favoured by men across the generations when he inferred that Dame Jenni Murray was partly responsible for the BBC’s one-sided handling of the gender debate. “… why didn’t famous Murray make a stink about her trans ‘cancel’ row at the time? Could have made a difference,” he wrote.

In pursuit of the truth

The grumpy old men who have rushed to the BBC’s defence need to re-acquaint themselves with the basics of news reporting. Every trainee journalist – even in these days of instant content – knows that the core principles of news reporting are truthfulness, accuracy, impartiality, and fairness.

The BBC may still produce some fantastic entertainment – Celebrity Traitors anyone? – but its reputation for balanced and factual news is in tatters. And if we can no longer trust what our national broadcaster tells us, why should we pay for the privilege of being told only half a story or worse?

The BBC can survive this crisis. But first it must apologise to women for its biased coverage of what is one of the most important stories of the decade. Then its leadership must show courage and change the way it works. In its last annual report, the BBC promised to “pursue truth with no agenda”.

As the centenary of its founding charter approaches, the corporation has to prove to the people who pay for it – you and I – that this is not glib corporate spin, but the BBC’s core and enduring principle.